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"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
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New South Wales finally got some legislation aimed at trying to protect native vegetation and endangered species, but so watered down, to pander to the farmer's organisations, as to be useless. Exemptions so big you could drive a bulldozer through them, and no real monitoring (of the kind that Queensland has used to start to turn the tide). Watching recently a repeat of the Landline program from earlier in the year that examined the issue, I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations. For two reasons.
First, these are the people who are supposed to have an overview of state and country. An individual farmer can't know much beyond his own farm and those of his neighbours. Impossible to get a sense of the general picture. But anyone who has access to the environmental data from the whole country, and from the whole state of NSW, and who is not a fool, knows the dire situation we are faced with, and the drastic actions that are needed. Instead they are not just encouraging farmers to keep on clearing land in a state that has already had more land clearing than it can survive, but preventing, through their massive political power, any serious moves to improve the situation. Seeking good compensation or subsidy deals for their members is the appropriate activity for these organisations, not resisting any conservation measures any where any time, and pretending that there is no environmental problem while blasting good people who are trying to protect the environment.
The second reason is that these leaders present arguments which simply promote the view that farmers are not part of the wider community and have absolutely no interest in protecting the environment. One I heard was sneering about global warming as if farmers had no interest in contributing solutions to the biggest problem all of us face this century. I know that most individual farmers don't think like this, although those who pretend to believe that the old rule about clearing 2 hectares meant that you could clear all the land that might have held the number of trees that you could pack into 2 hectares, certainly seem to. But most farmers are concerned about the world we all share, and need leadership that will help them do the right thing. They certainly haven't been getting that lately. Demand better.
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